When it comes to marketing, the general consensus is content is king. Every business under the sun is facing increasing competition, and it’s getting harder and harder to stand out. However, by publishing and sharing added value content, companies are able to get a leg up on the competition and provide marketing leads with far more than a ham-fisted, hard sell.

But coming up with truly original and useful content that adds value can often be pretty tricky, and some business owners understandably struggle. That’s why more and more companies are now focusing their efforts on content curation rather than creation for their content marketing efforts.

What is Content Curation?

Simply put, content curation is the process of sifting through huge amounts of digital content, gathering all the best bits and repackaging them in an organized and significant way. For the record, “repackaging” does not mean attempting to claim the content of others. Full credit must always be given where it’s due.

Yet by cherry-picking select pieces of juicy, existing content and re-sharing it in a format that is compatible with your company’s unique marketing strategy, you’ll be able to capitalize off the expertise of others in order to provide your own business with credibility as an industry thought leader.

How Do You Use Content Curation?

Now that you know the answer to, “What is content curation?”, there are plenty of ways small business owners are able to fit it snugly into their marketing efforts. And once you’ve found the web’s top sources of dynamic, industry-specific content, you can set up RSS feeds and push notifications to ensure you’re always up-to-date on all the freshest material.

One of the most common emerging trends has been to publish daily or weekly company blog posts and collect and republish snippets of useful, industry-related resources from across the web. This is an incredibly simple method of content curation — but it’s also pretty effective. By creating a one-stop shop for would-be consumers, businesses are able to save web users loads of time and keep leads from bouncing off their websites.

This type of content curation is also used quite effectively in terms of email marketing. If your company has got a mailing list of leads, weekly or monthly newsletters are a great way to bring traffic to your site and establish your business as a thought leader without trying to make a hard sell. It doesn’t take a whole lot of effort to track down and repackage useful snippets from across the web, but it can pay big dividends in terms of getting users to click through to your site regularly.

This sort of content curation might be relatively new to you — but there’s a pretty good chance you’ve been unknowingly using content curation for years in the form of social media.

Social media sites are a fantastic way to showcase your product landing pages and spread the good word about your company’s services. But one of the best ways to build up a decent following is to share content from other accounts that will engage your followers and stimulate discussion. By sharing ideas and stories from established thought leaders and like-minded businesses, you can create your own online community that will inevitably build invaluable sales leads.

At the end of the day, content curation is generally a trial-and-error process. You’ve got to get a good feel for what your consumers or followers want or need in terms of content and tinker with how to offer them value. But if you’re willing to play around and stick with it, content curation is an incredibly simple process that has the potential to offer your business big results.